In April, Donald Trump sparked a huge $1.5 trillion stock market rally when he called off a major military attack on Iranian civilian infrastructure via his social media platform, Truth Social. Anyone with advance knowledge that the post was coming could have made millions — and now, Trump’s company has begun selling early access to his potentially market-moving posts to Wall Street firms and others for a whopping $100,000 a month. It’s a textbook example of insider trading — and a violation of the public’s First Amendment rights. But we have a plan to stop him. The Intercept is suing Trump to shut down his Truth Social insider-trading scheme, and we’ll be in court tomorrow asking a federal judge to block Trump from sharing government information on Truth Social. Here’s the catch: We’ve just fully exhausted our legal budget for the year, and to fund fights like this, we need an urgent influx of reader donations. If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately: Trump uses Truth Social as his first and primary means of communication with the public, and the CEO of Truth Social’s parent company — in which Trump owns a 41.4 percent stake — bragged openly that Truth API offers early access to “the most market-moving” information. Our complaint — filed in conjunction with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, with legal assistance from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Public Integrity Project, and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic — asserts that the monetization scheme violates the Fifth Amendment by charging “unreasonable sums” for equal access to government information and by undermining the right to equal protection under the law. Trump is trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell. Our lawsuit can shut down this entire scam, but this fight is eating up scarce resources, and we’re counting on your support. 
Thank you,
The Intercept team
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